


two-headed calf

by kotaro_kun



Series: from me, with dread [4]
Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Animal Sacrifice, Childhood Friends, Childhood Sweethearts, Fluff and Angst, God - Freeform, Growing Up Together, Illnesses, M/M, POV Akaashi Keiji, Urban Fantasy, bokuto's grandma, bokuto's mom - Freeform, i read a lot of poetry writing this guys
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-04
Updated: 2021-02-04
Packaged: 2021-03-15 14:08:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,836
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29190549
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kotaro_kun/pseuds/kotaro_kun
Summary: Koutarou says God lives in the crab-apple tree in his backyard.
Relationships: Akaashi Keiji/Bokuto Koutarou
Series: from me, with dread [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2006623
Comments: 3
Kudos: 8





	two-headed calf

**Author's Note:**

> this is inspired by the taking tree. there's some animals being killed here, nothing graphic tho, just mentions

Koutarou says God lives in the crab-apple tree in his backyard.

He told Keiji this for the first time when they were four and crossing the church parking lot. Keiji had watched Koutarou's mom squeeze him into his puffy orange jacket like a piece of meat through the meat grinder, pointedly ignoring his kicks and bites.

"Don't you want to visit God?" Keiji asks, their clammy hands clasped together as they waddle through the dewy pavement.

"God doesn't live in some old church, y'know. He lives in my backyard, it's true, Ma told me."

Keiji just hums, because Koutarou talks too loudly and his mom is yelling at him to stop joking about God. His friend wilts even more, becoming smaller, hoping his Momma won't notice him that way.

He's too big. He's everywhere. Koutarou's too bright. His mother can spot him from miles away. And while it makes his friend's life harder Keiji wishes it does not change. For all of this makes it easier to follow the star.

…

His earliest memory is with Koutarou.

He's looking at his plump legs in rolled-down socks and Koutarou's got sunshine under his tongue, throwing squished blackberries to the birds. His friend's round cheeks are purple and red from the juices and the mid afternoon sun. There's no sound in the memory yet he knows exactly what he is supposed to be hearing; the buzzing of a hundred cicadas and the buzzing of Koutarou's voice, wild and strong, reflecting its owner.

He thinks in the distance he might hear the rustling of the apple tree with the summer wind.

The lingering sweet taste of the sun warmed berries in his mouth tastes like a thousand memories.

Mostly all that Keiji remembers from his childhood is at his friend's house. His parents were busy people and the neighbor kid needed company, so everyday they'd wrap him in a blanket and deposit the bundle by the sleepy Koutarou's side, shove sippy cups with chocolate milk in their hands and leave to come back at six.

Ma's house always smells like holidays and everything in there is just right.

She hangs the sheets to dry while they roll in the grass, smearing themselves with green, or climb a tree at the edge of the forest, hands sticky with sap and itching with scratches. They had always been messy kids - messy hair, sticky fingers, bruised shins, scraped knees. Their skins grimy with dirt and sweat and dark crescents under nails. Their little group of friends parading down the street, coated from head to toe in red dust from the meadows, or from Mars, laughing so hard old Mr. Ukai glares at them from his front window.

Keiji holds the tips of his trembling fingers as he watches Koutarou's happiness flow out of his body and towards their friends and everything he touches, the little tree house not nearly large enough to contain all of it, he witnesses all of those rowdy kids fall in love with his boy. Know the perpetrator will not take responsibility. Just like the dark sky does not take credit in holding the moon, but still shares it, still allows it to be known.

Last week he watched the boy steal a plastic pot full of dead marigolds from someone's front porch. Today they were shining orange and gold like his eyes. He's just an spectator witnessing his friend make plants and people come back to life.

His boy is a supernova, amorphous and incandescent. Keiji is afraid he'll blind him, he knows he will. But he can't look away.

_Imagine being that bright; imagine that kind of warmth._

…

Keiji is fifteen when he hears about the God in the tree again.

They are laying side by side on Koutarou's bed, shoulders touching as they stare at the plastic stars in the ceiling and his friend's eyes are damp and his mom is in the hospital removing a piece of herself that wasn't supposed to be her.

Keiji is older, which means he's not the boy full of scabs and loose teeth, he's got rougher hands and learned more words. He wants to be as bright for Koutarou as he is for him, but he's afraid his tongue will turn to ashes once he mouths a lie. The truth is he doesn't know and he can't bring people back to life like the boy with the white eyelashes does.

They go outside and watch Ma overturn the earth around the apple tree in the backyard, his friend stabbing an apple with a pocketknife, bare feet planted in the damp grass, summer breeze heavy against their unclothed shoulders.

Koutarou's white skin glows ethereal in the sun, his white hair a divine halo while his fierce eyes glance forward, dizzied with sadness or worry. Keiji wants to say "look at me. I'm soft. I'm softer with you. Because of you." Instead he let's the other stare at the painfully rigid curve of his grandmother's spine from years of picking the heavy boys up. All their growth is on her back.

Keiji sees her bury a row of Tupperwares filled with leftovers. From a distance he could still feel the tender and gentle way she deposited them on the ground.

"Are those for God?" Koutarou asks, ripping a slice of apple from the pulp.

"Yes. Wanted to thank Him for taking care of your mother."

"Like a prayer?"

Ma's mouth got a sour turn to it, the way it does when they whisper words they were taught not to speak. "Betcha that's what they teach you boys in that Sunday school huh? No, you can't ask God for anything, only thank him for everything he has done."

_Everything he has done_.

Keiji thinks round cheeks, crooked teeth, thighs and arms touching during train rides, secret phone calls, closed doors, shared heat, kisses falling over Keiji like stars, his partner's skin melting on his mouth like sugar, his feelings a peach on the vine, so ripe, ready for the fall, and Koutarou's hands there to catch the plump fruit, feel the sweet juice between his lips.

"Is He gonna eat it?"

She shrugs, "Why you asking me?"

Her hands caress the tree with the same tenderness it does his unruly locks, becoming them over to do the same. His rough fingertips are brushing the scarred surface before jerking away a second later. There's nothing cold or hard. The tree is pliable and warm like an elderly's skin, and his fingertips tremble with the touch of holiness, divinity curling through his veins like aching, like fire.

Koutarou's greedy stained fingers are reaching for the bark again, the sound of Ma's joyful laughter ringing in the air.

…

Koutarou is outside digging around the tree.

This, he expected since his Momma had gone back to the hospital with stab pains that got to be no good.

So he waits. Waits until the little warmth vanishes from the bed, waits until the sun is a thin orange line in the horizon, waits until someone is in the shower; and then gets out of bed.

He shivers, the misty yard dampening his curls but still he steps in the orville slick grass with his tattered boots, striding towards the apple tree in search of some treats and snacks.

That ain't what he finds though, after soaking his tanned hands in the rain-kissed earth. All he uncovers is a collection of empty containers and the orange and white fur of Tetsurou's cat, a scrawny calico named Kenma, bent neck still warm from Bokuto's cruel hands.

His knees vibrate with the God's hum under him, the air around the tree scalding hot forcing even the indigo morning air to ebb away. Yet he raises his palm towards the rough skin, even if his hands come back as coal, he has to, needs to see what Koutarou did. Needs to have ichor run through his veins too.

Then, he isn't Keiji Akaashi anymore. He's an old man spitting bitter tobacco, his gums are numb. He's an abused wife hiding with her son in the closet, she's tired. He's a fisherman's daughter, feet in the shallow waters, skin sun blistered and tight. He's a baby chewing on his squishy toes. He's Ma staring at the wall with a deep ache on her chest, hearing her grandson's sobs from the bathroom. He's his lover standing in the shower, ice cold water reverse-burning his back, quivery hands and lips. He was Koutarou's mother, scared in the corner of a hospital room. 

He's a thousand different people. With a thousand different thoughts. Dreading a thousand different futures.

Then he was just a confused and scared boy kneeling by an apple tree.

…

He thinks _that boy's no good_ when he catches Bokuto humming contentedly around the kitchen later in the day.

_The boy's just no good,_ when he stands at Bokuto's side while he consoles a distressed Tetsurou, promising to help search for Kenma.

…

Keiji is eighteen and nobody's. 

He's nobody's son. Nobody's partner. Nobody's neighbor. Nobody's acquaintance.

He's six hours away from his lover and falling in love everyday. Not his lover evermore though, he reminds himself, right now he doesn't belong to anybody. And not falling for _him_ , but for the lined toy horses on a windowsill, for the neon lights that halos him in the dark, for paperback books, for coffee.

He's more likely to be murdered right now but there's a gentleness from that, from the abundance of violence and how it cannot touch his personhood.

There's no stars in this big old city.

There's lights and gleaming buildings, there's a thousand eyes and gray sky. There's the lone walk from his apartment to campus.

Life had never felt as empty or as sweet as this.

_i miss you because i made the mistake  
_ _of thinking your bones were a good place  
_ _to grow roots even though people are  
_ _not gardens but [...]_

…

Keiji feels life sliding out of him for the first time when he's twenty-one. And he isn't the one dying; Koutarou is.

His stomach is a melon split wide inside his skin as he studies the young man on the wheelchair, smiling with empty joy.

Keiji didn't know that it was possible for Koutarou to die. When someone is walking too slowly in front of him, or doesn't utter a Thank you after he has assisted them on his shitty retail job and he's momentarily wishing little tragedies on them; he doesn't remember those people are going to die.

How wide does the crack in heaven have to split?

Koutarou smiles and says he missed him. Keiji doesn't reply.

_Why haven't you told me_ , he wants to ask but already got the answer. They don't talk about these things, what makes them cry at night, those things are meant for the empty box on the cold moon, not his happy partner who's busy living life hours away from the decaying pale boy.

It was his fault he knew, because Keiji wanted to live and Koutarou was in the way, but how could he have known? They are young, and life is long and they have time. Except that was taken from them. From _him_.

So he steps inside the warm house, watches the dust swirl in gold eddies around the hall, deciding he wouldn't allow his love to die that way. He'll bring Koutarou back to life.

Luckily he knows where God lives.

…

He is crouching inside the old tree house, looking out the window to the vast emptiness below him. This place has never felt this empty before, this solemn, this dark.

When he was nine he used to believe there was nothing but light under Koutarou's skin. You cut him and he shines. Now he knows better than no one how red his partner bleeds.

Keiji remembers the sobbing boy burying his childhood friend's cat under the tree, recalls how happy he was later in the day, and most vividly the relief on his face after his mother told him the pains had been a false alarm. She was okay, and was going to live.

A life for a life.

This was no bargain or thank-you-gift though, it wouldn't do to kill a measly animal life. It had to be something big.

Keiji left home knowing tonight he will be the reaper.

The stain of the moon is upon everything as he slithers across the edge of the forest and towards the ancient tree. Silver eats at the leaves and smears the horned branches, dripping from leaf to leaf and falling on Keiji's hunched back. The only sounds are of his labored breathing and of the owls he had met as chickens. Koutarou and his family are inside the house sleeping but the boy isn't worried about them walking up. Ma and his mother's purple under eyes are a giveaway of their eternal fatigue and Koutarou isn't strong enough to even get out of bed alone.

He grimaces at the thought, digging with more urgency. He remembers one time when they were driving along the coast, going back home from a day at the beach. Koutarou, always excitable and optimistic, had forgone the sunscreen and his tired mother gave up on yelling after him. They played the entire day, spraying sea water on each other, rolling on the sand, picking broken shells, getting sticky with popsicles and the lethargic honey moment.

Later when the sky was turning purple they left and Koutarou was, in his words, dying.

He laid sprawled in the backseat while Keiji rode shotgun, watching the palm trees swirl in sickening patterns outside the window.

"How do you know you're going to die?" He wailed, kicking his tiny feet on the door.

_When the doctor tells you,_ he thought of replying but Koutarou's mother was faster. He remembers how surprised both of them were by her confident tone when she replied "When you can no longer make a fist."

Koutarou did not die that day, instead he continue lying in the back seat, closing and opening one small hand, his Momma - Aoi, who raised a boy and provided for him and her own mother, who came home every night with a broken back and still had energy to smile and bring sliced apples to her son's room, whom, if allowed would still tie his shoes for him; she was also making a fist. 

Koutarou can't make a fist now.

Keiji jumps inside the hole he had made, it is longer than Keiji is tall and its depth reaches about the boy's chest. Keiji isn't sure what happens to the bodies - he couldn't find Kenma's skeleton, and he imagined the tree probably ate it, like the leftovers from Ma.

He wonders if the tree will eat the corpse before it starts to stink. Maybe he should bury it alive to give more time.

His parents spent a hefty amount of their weekly telephone time complaining about the useless drunks, who'd come from neighboring towns to get wasted and get in fights with people that don't know them in the dozens of recently opened bars on the main street.

His parents call it an infestation.

You see, Keiji was six when he saw kittens drown.

Koutarou's older cousin, Shinsuke, lived in a well kept farm on the outskirts of town and they periodically visited him every late August, to go blackberry-picking with pea tins and jam-pots.

"Scrawny poor things," Shinsuke was murmuring while throwing the kittens into a metal bucket. Keiji heard their little paws scratch at the metal before being drowned out by the pumping of the water, forcing their frantic cries to cease. "See, isn't this better for them."

The three boys watched the kittens bob like wet gloves to the surface, shiny and glossy, before Shinsuke fished them out by the tails, sagging and dead.

For years he feared the older boy, first because of the drowned kittens, then when he trapped big rats, snared rabbits, shot crows, or, with a sickening tug, pulled chickens' necks.

But living displaces false sentiments and when Keiji visited at sixteen and there was a bucket full of shrill puppies ready to drown, he just shrugged.

In the city 'preventing cruelty' was a common topic among the youth, who get their grass-fed organic meat delivered at their door every Wednesday, for they consider death unnatural, but in well-run farms like Shinsuke's pests have to be kept down.

Koutarou's life is surely more valuable than a pest. Maybe only one wouldn't be enough.

Keiji reaches for one of the tree's roots to pull himself out of the hole, except the root is as hot as boiling oil and he jerks his hand away with a choke, refusing to allow any noise to leave his mouth. Before he can process the pain or the shock he is suddenly tipping over backwards into the recently dug grave, having overbalanced in his surprise. He would've fallen inside if it wasn't for something whip like wrapping around his bony wrist and righting him.

The raven blinks, staring at the root snaked around his forearm until the scalding temperature starts leaking through his long-sleeve shirt, burning his arm and sending him in panic agony. Keiji scrambles to the opposite direction of the heat that is suffocating him, he manages barely two steps when a rope of lava is curling around his ankle and dragging him to the floor like a Kraken does with boats. He gets on his knees, but something overwhelmingly heavy is pushing him down, chest flat against the dark-moist soil, a moment shared between him and the earthworms. The heat isn't there anymore to thicken the air, the roots withdrawing while the crushing weight only increases.

Dirt and rocks rain around and at him, the roots contorting and jolting, bringing all the piled earth back into place, on top of the boy. Keiji only has a split second of clarity to get on his knees and hands to create a small air pocket before the last of the moonlight abandons him. He can faintly hear the sound of more earth being packed above him, albeit fainter by the second. Buried alive, a special kind of terror.

The terror doesn't have a chance to settle in, though, because the universe starts singing to him.

Part of Keiji is still under the soil, braced on his hands and knees, but another part is walking along a sidewalk, carrying a jar in his soft chubby hands, there's a dead monarch butterfly inside it and he's got a woman's hand warm against his head. He is sleeping in a bed, he is a hundred bodies in a hundred different beds, some warm, some cold, all breathing evenly.

The hum of the tree starts syncing with his thoughts, every passing moment transforms him in another one hundred people all at the same time, their hearts on the pit of his stomach, and their thoughts all consuming. Keiji is grieving and celebrating, he's mad and unbelievably peaceful, he's in tormenting agony and high ecstasy. So real as if his own body is experiencing it all; bursting with prayers.

It keeps going, every second that passes the part of Keiji who is buried under the tree gets smaller and smaller, so insignificant to the point he can barely remember it. He is every man and woman and child on the planet, he's a constellation, a galaxy, a thousand suns. He's everything that exists. All mingling into an omnipresent hum of consciousness. Keiji experiences being born for a second time, then a third and thousandth, life blooming with a ceaseless explosion of sensations, and just as often he feels how it is to die, people’s lights flickering out completely. Death, the blurred ghost in the fog, each step taking you closer to it, the only thing that will certainly happen.

The comings and goings, though, don’t matter, because Keiji can hear the hum everywhere and in everything, the language of God, eternal and immune from the fluctuations of its composition.

God sings to him; sings _about_ him.

As long as it sounds it should've been, the entire moment is fleeting and doesn’t last. One by one, then in hundreds and thousands at a time, the minds slip from him. Now all that’s left of Keiji is a trembling boy buried alive in his childhood sweetheart’s backyard. He's just a young man filled with the deaths of other people, owning one mind, one soul and one life, desperate to not allow it to slip away like the others. He's got no spares.

Inch by inch he rises from the ground, sculpting his body on the fertile soil and sticking a victorious hand out in the fresh night air. He can't help but think it feels a bit like being born again.

He lays at the side of the tree, shivering, moonlight kissing his skin with her dappled lips, he smells like deep earth and sweet orville, it clings to him, to his mouth.

"So? Did He grant your wish?"

Keiji is obese with fatigue, barely managing to turn his neck towards Koutarou's voice. There his boy was, dressed in silvery light. In fact he's just wearing his cartoon pajamas and sitting on the wheelchair. As fragile and bright as ever. Keiji loves him so much. Adores him immensely.

He doesn't answer verbally but there's no need to, like all lovers they've got their own language.

"Asking doesn't work, I'd know. He's not the genie in a bottle - or tree, I suppose." Koutarou smiles lightly, so skinny yet with full cheeks. "When Momma was sick I fucked up big time. I asked Him to make her better, to not take her away from me. She wasn't going to die anyway, but stupid ol' me didn't know that at the time. How could I? I thought giving a life for a life would balance things, maybe. The tree doesn't stop death though - it gives us something much more valuable than that."

Keiji's throat is full of early longing, for everything that could and won't be. "You're still going to die."

"Does that scare you?"

He says nothing. It used to. Not to be here, not to be anywhere. No sight or sound. But not anymore. He now knows what death feels like. A drop of rain in an endless ocean, gone in an instant but still part of the whole.

Koutarou grins, once again understanding the silence, "Me neither. And that is the true gift of the tree."

…

_Be still, my soul, and steadfast._ _  
__Earth and heaven both are still watching_ _  
__though time is draining from the clock_ _  
__and your walk, that was confident and quick,_ _  
__has become slow._

_So, be slow if you must, but let_ _  
__the heart still play its true part._ _  
__Love still as once you loved, deeply_ _  
__and without patience. Let God and the world_ _  
__know you are grateful._  
 _That the gift has been given._ _  
_\- Mary Oliver


End file.
